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Meet 'Lore' The Most Entertaining Kickstarter Project Of All Time

Lore is a video game project on Kickstarter that defies all the rules—of grammar and punctuation.

I’ve written quite a bit about Kickstarter, and have praised and critiqued many video game crowdfunding projects on the site. But I’ve never come across a Kickstarter project quite so surprising and delightfully awful as “Lore.”

The project’s creator describes the game as “Dark Souls, Diablo II, and Minecraft all in one” and goes on to note:

This is the first time in video gaming history a development team is going to let pubic see and be apart of a game from start to finish. Meaning you see the full progression of the game. I know this may be disheartening to some, game do not look good from the start it takes time. I’m doing my project this way because ill like to rise awareness of what developers go through.this is in hopes this give gamer’s a new respected for the art of making a video game so please back and be apart of gaming history.

Indeed, it goes on and on like this for some time, spelling mistakes and punctuation errors littering the page like some extended email from a Nigerian prince asking you to back his video game project.

The project includes concept art, such as the “Manandtaur:”

This ferocious piece of concept monster art is accompanied by the cuddly sidekick Grimmy the Gremlin:

When it was pointed out in the comments to the project that said goblin was a packaged Autodesk asset that comes bundled with the Maya software, the project was updated to read:

lol is this was done in maya i was making his animations and i was having a little fun P.S. by the way grimmy came with maya i made my on rig, controls and animations for him and his name

And finally, in the Risks and and Challenges section at the end:

We understand this is something that has never been done but in 1492 Christopher Columbus went out into the sea and everybody told him he was going to fall off the end of the world but with his risk and passion we now know the earth is round and without his will and guts we would not be where we are today. The point i am trying to make nothing is risk free 16 years ago there was no internet but one man changed that. HEDY LAMARR was a actresses in the 1930′s she came up with guided torpedoes for world war 2 she called and called the US army, government but no one listened because she was beauty and she was a actresses. My point is no one can understand vision if it was the 1930′s are 1492 would kickstarter be a place to support like Hedy Lamarr and Christopher Columbus.

Of course, funding a video game on Kickstarter and letting backers get a nice glimpse of the project as it emerges is something that most certainly has been done before, but never with quite this much bravado.

I won’t update my Rules for Kickstarter piece to include a basic handle on the English language, grammar, punctuation and so forth—if only because I hope against hope that Kickstarter attempts to exert some measure of quality control over future projects.

I mean, this isn’t even the first time Lore was given the Kickstarter treatment. Back in November the same project was shooting for ten times as much funding—a whopping $1.5 million.

Whether it’s a scam or just an example of naivete and hubris mixing in the worst sort of way is harder to determine. All I know is that if this is a scam, they really need to get on the ball. I suspect we will see some very sneaky con jobs in the crowdfunding scene in the next couple of years, but this surely isn’t one of them.

If it’s not a scam, than let me just reiterate some advice: Before you come to Kickstarter with a game, have at least half of it finished. Have screenshots and video footage of the game, and make sure your goals are clearly stated from the beginning. For this particular project, a video would certainly go a long ways toward proving to the world that actual people were behind this project and lived where they said they lived.

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I loved following you discover this on Twitter. I went and checked it out and either this is the worst example of a Kickstarter project and thepeople have no idea what to do or this is a not-so-subtle trolling of idiots that would pay for something that has the worst front of any project ever.

My money is probably on troll or art project – if it isn’t either, it’s sort of sad, because it means the guy has basically no sense of what he needs to make a game, or any sense of why he can’t, and it becomes more like the interview scene in Monster…

Turns out today that several more of the pieces or art he used in the kickstarter video were taken without permission for use in a project like this… (Taking a quote from the comments section of the kickstarter)

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Then there’s the Creator’s comment that he’s “Saving copies of all of the comments because it’s the law” (Somewhat paraphrased for readability since the Creator refuses to use punctuation)

Lore has got to be a troll, in fact I doubt Grimmy the Gremlins parentage, I’m sure he’s got more than a little Troll in his genetic makeup.

But all in all I think it’s a pretty harmless troll. It’s unlikely in the extreme that he’ll get anywhere near his target so the backers money is safe. In fact I think it’s pretty funny when you take it as some kind of ironic joke or commentary on Kickstarter. As far as trolling goes it’s a bit of a masterpiece of it’s kind. He’s committed to it, I mean who writes that much blurb in that way? I can barely read a paragraph of it without going cross-eyed never mind actually writing the thing! And he’s kept it just believable enough to just keep that doubt in your mind that maybe it is real. Someone’s modelling those 3D assets and drawing those concept arts after all. I actually have a suspicion there’s a team of expert troll wizards behind this.

My project is not a joke and some one of the people who commented has twisted my words. I know people who been trying to be on Forbes for years and my little project made it. But i’ll like to say thanks because of you i got free advertising. If you make people think joking are you have a problem with grammar they will do advertising you. Now that i have got my name out there i can show real work. Have you ever seem that Kevin spacey movie The Usual Suspects well you get my point lol. The greatest weapon can have is people under minding them. If a shake were a chameleon it would be a more deadly deadly predator. Thank about that and have a great night you made my work much easier .